Universities have been progressing from providing scholarship for a small fee into selling degrees at a large cost.

This is the natural evolution of every enterprise under the curse of success: from making a good into selling the good, into progressively selling what looks like the good, then going bust after they run out of suckers and the story repeats itself ... (The cheapest to deliver effect: "successful" cheese artisans end up hiring managers and progress into making rubber that looks like cheese, replaced by artisans who in turn become "successful"…).

Nassim Taleb